Tags: Society

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Happy Holidays!

The Franklin College of Arts and Sciences wishes you all the best for the holidays and in the new year 2020! University of Georgia offices will be closed beginning December 25 and re-open January 2, 2020.

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2019 in Review

The many great Franklin College stories of 2019 create a vibrant image of ongoing excellence at every level. Our faculty, students and staff are leading the University of Georgia in its most dynamic era yet. From TED Fellows to Guggenheim Fellowships, imaginative research and teaching draw out the best in our students. Our colleagues provided elegant expression to the fire at Notre Dame de Paris and the death of Toni Morrison,…

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Fall Commencement 2019

The University of Georgia will welcome its newest alumni Dec. 13 as 1,799 undergraduates and 1,263 graduate students—a total of 3,062—have met requirements to walk in the university’s fall Commencement ceremonies. The undergraduate Commencement ceremony is scheduled for 9:30 a.m. in Stegeman Coliseum, and tickets are required. The graduate ceremony does not require tickets and will follow at 2:30 p.m. Regent Kessel D. Stelling Jr…

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The [earning] power of humanities degrees

Fortune Magazine pushes back on the persistent misperception that links humanities degrees with low salaries: Robert B. Townsend, director of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences Washington, D.C. office, says that humanities majors secure jobs at pretty much the same rate as other people with degrees. “It’s certainly not in line with that picture that gives you the impression that they’re all baristas drowning in debt, and…

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Nzengung elected to National Academy of Inventors

Valentine Nzengung, professor of environmental geochemistry in the Franklin College Department of Geology who has conducted groundbreaking research on phytoremediation techniques, has been named a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, becoming the eighth UGA faculty member to receive the honor, all since 2013: Nzengung is the founder and CEO of MuniRem Environmental, which provides remediation products and services for…

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Kudos, Nov-Dec. 2019

Students and alumni lead the kudos as we count down to the end of 2019. Congratulations all: Herb Girls Athens, a two-woman team, won the 2018-19 FABricate competition with its signature product, a healthy coffee additive called Rally Coffee. The FABricate competition is designed to empower students to turn their great ideas into working businesses. Eileen Schaffer, an agribusiness master’s degree student, and …

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Dining across Differences

Commensality is the act of gathering to eat and drink. It is a fundamental social activity to create and cement relationships. Virginia Nazarea, professor of anthropology at the University of Georgia, takes this idea and uses it to discuss the creative responses of humans after the dislocation and placelessness that often comes with modernity and globalization.  As people, especially immigrants and refugees, move and change their…

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Focus on the Faculty: Cassia Roth

An extraordinary scholar of history and Latin American and Caribbean Studies, assistant professor Cassia Roth brings humility and a passion for scholarship into the classroom: My work looks at the intersection of medicine and law in women’s reproductive lives. My forthcoming book, “A Miscarriage of Justice: Women’s Reproductive Lives and the Law in Early Twentieth-Century Brazil” (Stanford University Press, 2020),…

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Faculty receive First-Year Odyssey Teaching Awards

First-Year Odyssey Seminars are some of the most important early academic experiences students can have at UGA. Broadly-themed courses taught by senior faculty feed a sense of discovery in students about knowledge, about the world, and importantly, about themselves as students begin to learn and cultivate their own interests. Four UGA faculty members, two from the Franklin College have received a 2019 First-Year Odyssey Teaching Award in…

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UGA receives $15.75M to combat human trafficking

Human trafficking involves recruitment, harboring or transporting people into a situation of exploitation through the use of violence, deception or coercion and forcing victims to work against their will. A process of enslavement,  trafficking affects millions of men, women, and children – including in the United States. It can happen in any community and victims can be any age, race, gender, or nationality, and now…

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Tackling youth vaping with neuroscience

Jiaying Liu and Lawrence Sweet are working to produce scientific data to inform the public about vaping products and to guide efforts toward enacting bans on flavored products: Liu, assistant professor of communication studies, and Sweet, professor of psychology and director of the Clinical Neuroscience Laboratory, have teamed up to investigate vaping among young adults. Liu secured internal grant funding through the Office…

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2020 Bulldog 100

The UGA Alumni Association has unveiled the 2020 Bulldog 100 list of fastest-growing businesses owned or operated by UGA alumni, Including 29 alumni honorees from the Franklin College: The 2020 Bulldog 100 includes businesses of all sizes and from industries such as technology, cosmetics, entertainment and education. Companies are based as far north as Virginia and as far west as Nevada. Of the 100 businesses, 84 are located…

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Oral history project for university veterans

From near death experiences to the best and worst days of their lives, the University of Georgia is keeping an archive of student veterans’ stories: The goal is to preserve history, and to date almost 90 histories have been recorded. The stories might include why the student joined the military, what a typical day was like, where they were on Sept. 11, 2001, if they saw active duty, how they would describe service, stories that best…

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Veteran and history graduate student helps other veterans tell their story

Former cadet at the United States Military Academy Tom McShea will soon return to West Point on a two-year assignment to teach, after he finishes a master’s degree in American history at UGA: And while at UGA, he’s recording interviews for UGA’s Student Veterans Oral History Project. Working out of the Student Veterans Resource Center,  he asks open-ended questions and the students talk about what…

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22-member faculty team to study the history of slavery at UGA

The University of Georgia has awarded a grant to a 22-member UGA academic team to study the history of slavery at UGA from the institution’s founding in 1785 until the end of the Civil War in 1865. The research team—which spans multiple schools, colleges and other units across the university—will conduct a multidisciplinary study of enslaved African Americans who labored on the UGA campus. In September, the team submitted a proposal, which was…

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Libraries, theatre collaboration brings incarceration history to the stage

Beginning this Friday, November 8, the first-of-its-kind endeavor, By Our Hands – a cross-institutional theatrical experience between Spelman College, the University of Georgia, librarians, archivists, students, professionals, incarcerated individuals, and community partners – takes the Fine Arts theatre stage. The Georgia Incarceration Performance Project incorporates scenes directly from Georgia history to negotiate our relationship…

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Kudos, October 2019

Fantastic news about faculty, staff and students inside and beyond the classroom over the last month: Distinguished Research Professor of Geography Andy Herod was recently re-appointed by Governor Kemp to the State's Complete Count Committee for the 2020 Census, by Executive Order in September. Herod had previously been appointed to the Committee by Governor Deal Barbara McCaskill, Professor of English and Associate Academic…

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Viral Maps: when content catches on

When you think about content going viral, maps don’t typically come to mind, but “The Eclipse: Smothered and Covered,” a map with the 2017 eclipse path of totality overlaid with the best Waffle House locations for viewing, did just that. The map was created by University of Georgia assistant professor of geography Jerry Shannon. After being retweeted by Waffle House, Shannon’s map quickly went viral. Almost 200,000 people viewed the tweet, and…

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UGA libraries partner with Google Books

The extraordinary treasure that is the University of Georgia libraries has a new digital access partnership with Google Books to digitize about 120,000 of the Libraries’ 4.5 million volumes: Through a new partnership with Google, about 120,000 of the Libraries’ 4.5 million volumes will be digitized, allowing further access to literary, historic, scientific and reference books and journals through UGA’s library catalog as well as one of…

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History Lunch & Learn: Money Apocalypse

In the spirit of Homecoming week, the history department welcomes back alumnus speak Sean Vanatta: Join the Russell Library for a lunch and learn held in conjunction with the exhibit Now and Then: 1979. Sean Vanatta, a "triple dawg" and visiting assistant professor of history in the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University, will present on the Volcker Shock and the end of financial stability.  The Volker…

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DJ Summits in the Global South

Lynnée Denise is a Los Angeles-based artist, writer and academic who practices “DJ Scholarship,” which her official biography describes as a method “to re-position the role of the DJ from a party purveyor to an archivist, cultural custodian and information specialist of music with critical value.” Denise will bring that unique brand of scholarship to the UGA and Athens communities with an evening of conversation and performance Oct. 17…

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New research traces the spread of Neolithic practices into Europe

The spread of agriculture from the Near East and Fertile Crescent through Turkey and into Europe around 10,000 years ago was a complex and multifaceted process, one that archaeologists are trying to understand using one of the latest scientific techniques: stable isotope analysis.  A new paper published in the journal PLOS One by Suzanne Pilaar Birch, assistant professor of geography and anthropology at the University of Georgia, and…

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Cherokee Removal, the Trail of Tears, and populism

UGA and the Franklin College welcome former Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation Chad Smith to deliver a Signature Lecture Thursday, October 10, 2019 at 4 p.m. in room 286 Miller Learning Center. In his lecture, "Cherokee Removal and the Trail of Tears: The Unlearned Lessons of Populism Today," Chad Smith looks at the rise of a hard-edged populism with Andrew Jackson, leading to Cherokee Removal…

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Student champions disability awareness

Alongside her double-major coursework, Tyler Burrell raises awareness about “invisible illness”—that not all people who look normal are able-bodied and healthy. “That person needing the elevator for one floor, the person with a handicap pass who looks totally healthy, might not be,” she said. “You never know someone’s whole story.” Burrell, a University of Georgia senior international affairs and communication studies…

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Gable Distinguished Chair brings focus on Colonial American history to UGA

The University of Georgia welcomes renowned historian and anthropologist James F. Brooks as the inaugural holder of the Carl and Sally Gable Distinguished Chair in Southern Colonial American History. An innovative scholar and teacher, Brooks is author of the prize-winning book Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship and Community in the Southwestern Borderlands, which garnered seven major prizes including the Bancroft, Parkman and…
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